Short Stories: Five Decades (14 page)

Paul smiled, remembering.

“You still laughing at my clothes?” Harriet asked.

“I remembered something I heard some place …” Paul said.

“‘What a delicious thing a man is …’”

Harriet looked at him coldly. “Who said that?”

Paul squinted suspiciously at her. “Oswald Spengler.”

“Uhuh,” Harriet said soberly. “It’s a famous quotation.”

“It’s a well-turned phrase,” said Paul.

“That’s what I think, too.” Harriet nodded agreeably and walked a little faster.

They passed the little run-down bar where’d they’d sat afternoons all winter drinking martinis and talking and talking, and laughing so loud the people at the other tables would turn and smile. Paul waited for Harriet to say something about the bar, but she didn’t even seem to notice it. “There’s Eddie’s Bar,” Paul said.

“Uhuh.” Harriet nodded briskly.

“He’s going to start making his martinis with sherry when all the French vermouth runs out,” Paul said.

“It sounds horrible.” Harriet made a face.

“Is that all you have to say?” Paul said loudly, remembering all the times he’d looked in to see if she was there.

“What do you want me to say?” Harriet looked honestly puzzled, but Paul had never known when she was lying to him or telling the truth, anyway, and he hadn’t improved in the two years, he discovered.

“I don’t want you to say anything. I’ll take you in and buy you a drink.”

“No, thanks. I’ve really got to get to Wanamaker’s and back home in a hurry. Give me a raincheck.”

“Yeah,” Paul said sourly.

They turned up Ninth Street toward Fifth Avenue.

“I knew I’d meet you some place, finally,” Paul said. “I was curious to see what would happen.”

Harriet didn’t say anything. She was looking absently at the buildings across the street.

“Don’t you ever talk any more?” Paul asked.

“What
did
happen?”

“Every once in a while,” he started, “I meet some girl I used to know …”

“I bet the country’s full of them,” Harriet said.

“The country’s full of everybody’s ex-girls.”

Harriet nodded. “I never thought of it that way, but you’re right.”

“Most of the time I think, isn’t she a nice, decent person? Isn’t it wonderful I’m no longer attached to her? The first girl I ever had,” Paul said, “is a policewoman now. She subdued a gangster single-handed in Coney Island last summer. Her mother won’t let her go out of the house in her uniform. She’s ashamed for the neighbors.”

“Naturally,” Harriet said.

“Another girl I used to know changed her name and dances in the Russian Ballet. I went to see her dance the other night. She has legs like a Fordham tackle. I used to think she was beautiful. I used to think you were beautiful, too.”

“We were a handsome couple,” Harriet said. “Except you always needed a shave. That electric razor …”

“I’ve given it up.”

They were passing his old house now and he looked at the doorway and remembered all the times he and Harriet had gone in and come out, the rainy days and the early snowy mornings with the milkman’s horse silent on the white street behind them. They stopped and looked at the old red house with the shabby shutters and the window on the fourth floor they had both looked out of time and time again to see what the weather was and Paul remembered the first time, on a winter’s night, when he and Harriet had gone through that door together.

“I was so damn polite,” Paul said softly.

Harriet smiled, knowing what he was talking about. “You kept dropping the key and saying, ‘Lord, Lord,’ under your breath while you were looking for it.”

“I was nervous. I wanted to make sure you knew exactly how matters stood—no illusions. Good friends, everybody understanding everybody else, another girl coming in from Detroit in six weeks, no claims on me, no claims on you …” Paul looked at the window on the fourth floor and smiled. “What a fool!”

“It’s a nice, quiet street,” Harriet said, looking up at the window on the fourth floor, too. She shook her head, took Paul’s arm again. “I’ve got to get to Wanamaker’s.”

They started off.

“What’re you buying at Wanamaker’s?” Paul asked.

Harriet hesitated for a moment. “Nothing much. I’m looking at some baby clothes. I’m going to have a baby.” They crowded over to one side to let a little woman with four dachshunds pass them in a busy tangle. “Isn’t it funny—me with a baby?” Harriet smiled. “I lie around all day and try to imagine what it’s going to be like. In between, I sleep and drink beer to nourish us. I’ve never had such a good time in all my life.”

“Well,” said Paul, “at least it’ll keep your husband out of the army.”

“Maybe. He’s a raging patriot.”

“Good. When he’s at Fort Dix I’ll meet you in Washington Square Park when you take the baby out for an airing in its perambulator. I’ll put on a policeman’s uniform to make it proper. I’m not such a raging patriot.”

“They’ll get you anyway, won’t they?”

“Sure. I’ll send you my picture in a lieutenant’s suit. From Bulgaria. I have a premonition I’m going to be called on to defend a strategic point in Bulgaria.”

“How do you feel about it?” For the first time Harriet looked squarely and searchingly at him.

Paul shrugged. “It’s going to happen. It’s all damned silly, but it isn’t as silly now as it was ten years ago.”

Suddenly Harriet laughed.

“What’s so funny?” Paul demanded.

“My asking you how you felt about something. I never used to have a chance … You’d let me know how you felt about everything. Roosevelt, James Joyce, Jesus Christ, Gypsy Rose Lee, Matisse, Yogi, liquor, sex, architecture …”

“I was full of opinions in those days.” Paul smiled a little regretfully. “Lust and conversation. The firm foundations of civilized relations between the sexes.”

He turned and looked back at the window on the fourth floor. “That was a nice apartment,” he said softly. “Lust and conversation …”

“Come on, Paul,” Harriet said. “Wanamaker’s isn’t going to stay open all night.”

Paul turned up his collar because the wind was getting stronger as they neared Fifth Avenue. “You were the only girl I ever knew I could sleep in the same bed with.”

“That’s a hell of a thing to say to a girl.” Harriet laughed. “Is that your notion of a compliment?”

Paul shrugged. “It’s an irrelevant fact. Or a relevant fact. Is it polite to talk to a married lady this way?”

“No.”

Paul walked along with her. “What do you think of when you look at me?” he asked.

“Nothing much,” Harriet said carefully.

“What’re you lying about?”

“Nothing much,” Harriet said flatly.

“Don’t you even think, ‘What in the name of God did I ever see in him?’”

“No.” Harriet put her hands deep in her pockets and walked quickly along the railings.

“Should I tell you what I think of when I look at you?”

“No.”

“I’ve been looking for you for two years,” Paul said.

“My name’s been in the telephone book.” Harriet hurried even more, wrapping her coat tightly around her.

“I didn’t realize I was looking for you until I saw you.”

“Please, Paul …”

“I would walk along the street and I’d pass a bar we’d been in together and I’d go in and sit there, even though I didn’t want a drink, not knowing why I was sitting there. Now I know. I was waiting for you to come in. I didn’t pass your house by accident.”

“Look, Paul,” Harriet pleaded. “It was a long time ago and it was fine and it ended.…”

“I was wrong,” Paul said. “Do you like hearing that? I was wrong. You know, I never did get married, after all.”

“I know,” Harriet said. “Please shut up.”

“I walk along Fifth Avenue and every time I pass St. Patrick’s I half look up to see if you’re passing, because I met you that day right after you’d had a tooth pulled, and it was cold; you were walking along with the tears streaming from your eyes and your eyes red and that was the only time I ever met you by accident any place.…”

Harriet smiled. “That certainly sounds like a beautiful memory.”

“Two years …” Paul said. “I’ve gone out with a lot of girls in the last two years.” He shrugged. “They’ve bored me and I’ve bored them. I keep looking at every woman who passes to see if it’s you. All the girls I go out with bawl the hell out of me for it. I’ve been walking around, following girls with dark hair to see if it’ll turn out to be you, and girls with a fur jacket like that old one you had and girls that walk in that silly, beautiful way you walk.… I’ve been searching the streets of the city for you for two years and this is the first time I’ve admitted it even to myself. That little Spanish joint we went the first time. Every time I pass it I remember everything—how many drinks we had and what the band played and what we said and the fat Cuban who kept winking at you from the bar and the very delicate way we landed up in my apartment.…”

They were both walking swiftly now, Harriet holding her hands stiffly down at her sides.

“There is a particular wonderful way you are joined together …”

“Paul, stop it.” Harriet’s voice was flat but loud.

“Two years. In two years the edge should be dulled off things like that. Instead …” How can you make a mistake as big as that? Paul thought, how can you deliberately be as wrong as that? And no remedy. So long as you live, no remedy. He looked harshly at Harriet. Her face was set, as though she weren’t listening to him and only intent on getting across the street as quickly as possible. “How about you?” he asked. “Don’t you remember …?”

“I don’t remember anything,” she said. And then, suddenly, the tears sprang up in her eyes and streamed down the tight, distorted cheeks. “I don’t remember a goddamn thing!” she wept. “I’m not going to Wanamaker’s. I’m going home! Good-bye!” She ran over to a cab that was parked at the corner and opened the door and sprang in. The cab spurted past Paul and he had a glimpse of Harriet sitting stiffly upright, the tears bitter and unheeded in her eyes.

He watched the cab go down Fifth Avenue until it turned. Then he turned the other way and started walking, thinking, I must move away from this neighborhood. I’ve lived here long enough.

The Monument

“
I
do not want any of his private stock,” McMahon said firmly. He blew on a glass and wiped it carefully. “I have my own opinion of his private stock.”

Mr. Grimmet looked sad, sitting across the bar on a high stool, and Thesing shrugged like a salesman, not giving up the fight, but moving to a new position to continue the attack. McMahon picked up another glass in his clean, soft bartender’s hands. He wiped it, his face serious and determined and flushed right up to the bald spot that his plastered-down hair couldn’t cover. There was nobody else in the bar at the front part of the restaurant.

It was three o’clock in the afternoon. In the rear three waiters stood arguing. Every day at three o’clock the three waiters gathered in the back and argued.

“Fascism,” one waiter said, “is a rehearsal for the cemetery.”

“You read that some place,” another waiter said.

“All right,” said the first waiter, “I read it some place.”

“An Italian,” the third waiter said to the first waiter. “You are one lousy Italian.”

Mr. Grimmet turned around and called to the waiters, “Please reserve discussions of that character for when you go home. This is a restaurant, not Madison Square Garden.”

He turned back to watching McMahon wiping the glasses. The three waiters looked at him with equal hate.

“Many of the best bars in the city,” Thesing said in his musical salesman’s voice, “use our private stock.”

“Many of the best bars in the city,” McMahon said, using the towel very hard, “ought to be turned into riding academies.”

“That’s funny,” Thesing said, laughing almost naturally. “He’s very funny, isn’t he, Mr. Grimmet?”

“Listen, Billy,” Mr. Grimmet said, leaning forward, disregarding Thesing, “listen to reason. In a mixed drink nobody can tell how much you paid for the rye that goes into it. That is the supreme beauty of cocktails.”

McMahon didn’t say anything. The red got a little deeper on his cheeks and on his bald spot and he put the clean glasses down with a sharp tinkle and the tinkle went through the shining lines of the other glasses on the shelves and sounded thinly through the empty restaurant. He was a little fat man, very compact. He moved with great precision and style behind a bar and you could tell by watching him whether he was merry or sad or perturbed, just from the way he mixed a drink or put down a glass. Just now he was angry and Mr. Grimmet knew it. Mr. Grimmet didn’t want a fight, but there was money to be saved. He put out his hand appealingly to Thesing.

“Tell me the truth, Thesing,” he said. “Is your private stock bad?”

“Well,” Thesing said slowly, “a lot of people like it. It is very superior for a blended product.”

“Blended varnish,” McMahon said, facing the shelves. “Carefully matched developing fluid.”

Thesing laughed, the laugh he used from nine to six. “Witty,” he said, “the sparkling bartender.” McMahon wheeled and looked at him, head down a little on his chest. “I meant it,” Thesing protested. “I sincerely meant it.”